Additional things to check:

• Make sure you have autoflush turned on in the filehandle. You can use something like (adapted from The Perl Cookbook

  my $old_fh = select(MAIL);
  $| = 1;
  select($old_fh);
  [download]

• The last print (the dot) should be:

  print MAIL ".\n";
  [download]

• According to the RFCs, line endings should be "\r\n" and not "\n" although this is usually ok.

In any case, please do consider using Net::SMTP, which allows your script to send the email in a more robust fashion.

Best regards

-lem, but some call me fokat